1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor device including an error correcting circuit (ECC).
2. Description of the Background Art
In semiconductor devices such as semiconductor memory devices, bit errors caused by hardware failure are encountered. There is also known a phenomenon called “soft error”, caused by the generation of pairs of electrons and holes in the silicon substrate when radiation such as α rays and neutron rays present in nature is introduced into the chip, leading to the possibility of destroying, in the worst case, data stored in the storage node of a memory cell.
Reflecting the recent progress in semiconductor processing, i.e. development in microminiaturization, the size of the storage element per se has been reduced in contrast to the increase of the storage capacity. The capacity of the storage node storing data has become smaller. It is known that the resistance with respect to soft error becomes lower as the storage capacity of the storage node in which data is stored is reduced. The bit error caused by such soft error has become a critical problem.
There is conventionally known a semiconductor device including an ECC circuit that executes error correction processing on a bit error to address such bit errors.
For example, when error correction processing using a Hamming code is to be executed, the so-called parity bit of n bits is employed. When there is a bit error in the regular data of m bits, the bit error is identified using the parity bit. Then, the data bit is inverted, for example, and output. The number of bits “n” of the parity bit is set so that the relationship of 2n−m≧m+1 is established based on the relationship between the regular data of m bits and the parity bit of n bits.
More specifically, a predetermined combination using such parity bits indicates the position information, which is called “syndrome”, to identify the error position, i.e. the location where a bit error has occurred. In data readout, the parity bits consisting of n bits are received together with the regular data consisting of m bits to calculate a syndrome that is to be generated based on a predetermined exclusive OR operation. The location of an error bit is identified based on the syndrome that is the calculated result to modify the regular m-bit data. This general Hamming code theory is disclosed in, for example, “Industrial Mathematics for Restudy”, CQ Publishing Co., Ltd., pp. 47-53.
In general, the ECC circuit must implement a plurality of columns of an exclusive OR circuit (also referred to as “XOR gate” hereinafter) that takes an exclusive OR to calculate a syndrome. Since the number of parity bits increases in proportion to the amount of information, i.e. the number of bits, in the storage device, the number of XOR gates will be inevitably increased according to the amount of information in the storage device, leading to more columns.
Increase in the number of columns of XOR gates induces the problem that the error correction processing rate will become slower.
Japanese Patent Laying-Open Nos. 05-144291 and 2000-132995 disclose a system of improving the integration level to increase the error correction processing rate by relatively reducing the number of columns of the XOR gates.
It is to be noted that, if the operating rate of the XOR gate per se constituting the ECC circuit can be increased, the error correction processing rate can be improved.
The circuit complexity is increased in accordance with the increase in the number of XOR gates, whereby the wiring that connects respective circuits becomes longer. As a result, the rate of error correction processing is degraded.